Preview of '98 AATSEEL Conference

[Benjamin Rifkin]

On behalf of the AATSEEL Conference Program Committee, I am pleased to
provide SEELANGers with this preview of our upcoming conference.

The 1998 AATSEEL Conference, to be held later this month in San Francisco,
promises to be an exciting venue for papers and discussions on a broad range
of Slavic-related topics:

Participation in the Linguistics Division is up this year with fourteen panels
plus the interdivisional panel on Linguistics and Pedagogy.  There are
panels in the areas of Phonology and Prosody, Morphology, Morphosyntax,
Discourse and Pragmatics, Sociolinguistics, Language Contact, and two
panels on Syntax.  Diachronic issues are explored on two panels: Historical
Linguistics and Medieval Slavic Texts.  New this year are panels on
Grammatical Animacy, Tense Aspect and Mood, and a panel sponsored by the
North American Association of Teachers of Czech on Varieties of Czech.

At this year's conference the Theory and Special Topics Division will offer
panels on Russian, Czech, Polish, Ukrainian, and comparative Slavic and
East European literatures, as well as numerous panels on cinema and
culture.  There will be special panels devoted to a wide range of literary
and cultural topics, including issues of gender and sexuality in literature
and culture, emigre literature and crosscultural issues among Russian and
American men and women, the phenomenon of the New Russian in literature and
the arts, literature and culture of the fin de siecle, intersections in
twentieth-century literature and the arts, metaphor and myth, images of St.
Petersburg, perceptions of the West, poetics and intertext, and many
others.  Cinema panels will offer a wide range of presentations on cinema
of the Former Soviet Union and Central and East European film from a
variety of perspectives--artistic, psychological, cultural, historical, and
political.

The Pre-Twentieth Century Literature Division will feature no fewer than
four panels concerned with Pushkin, in honor of the
upcoming anniversary of his birth. One may also note innovative panels in Old
Russian literature ("New Approaches to Old Russian Literature"), Eighteenth
Century
Literature ("Formation of Russian Literary Culture") and Nineteenth Century
Literature  ("Sex, Violence, and the Body in Russian Literature") topics.
Our division will be enriched by the participation of several scholars from
Novosibirsk State Pedagogical University.

Twentieth-Century literature is well represented at this year's conference.
In addition to a collection of promising single-author panels on Bulgakov,
Nabokov, Mandel'shtam, Pasternak, Platonov and Trifonov, the Division will
feature a number of topical panels on  various aspects of Modernism and the
Avant garde, a special panel on Religious Influences in Twentieth-Century
Russian Literature (with papers on Gor'kij, Remizov and Solzhenitsyn) and
two panels exploring the intersection of the Modern and Postmodern in the
fiction of late- and post-Soviet Russia.

The Pedagogy Division will feature a series of panels concerning the
acquisition of Russian as a foreign language; panels and fora focusing on
language instruction and technology; panels, a roundtable and a forum for
those interested in the languages of Central and Eastern Europe; and panels,
roundtable and fora for those interested in pre-college instruction. The
conference program includes a panel on issues in teaching basic Russian and
a panel on issues in teaching Russian at the intermediate and advanced
levels, as well as panels on content-based and task-based instruction, and
the teaching of reading and writing.  There will be a roundtable on the
issue of heritage learners in the Russian-language classroom.  Fora on
instructional materials will include discussions of new CD-ROMs for the
teaching of Russian and textbooks for Czech and Russian.

In addition to the events listed above, the Conference will feature its regular
poetry reading and a performance by a balalaika ensemble (from Luther College).

In sum, the 1998 Conference will feature 115 panels, roundtables and fora,
with over 400 individuals participating.   According to data provided by Dr.
Jerry Ervin, our association's Executive Director, over 500 people have
already preregistered to attend the conference.  For those of you who have
not yet preregistered, registration will be available on site in San
Francisco.  We hope to see you there.

The Conference Program Committee extends a warm invitation to all SEELANGers
to join us in San Francisco!  For more information, including the Conference
Program,
see the AATSEEL web site:

http://clover.slavic.pitt.edu/~djb/aatseel.html

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Benjamin Rifkin

Associate Professor of Slavic Languages
Coordinator of Russian-Language Instruction

Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1432 Van Hise Hall, 1220 Linden Dr.
Madison, WI  53706  USA

voice:  608/262-1623
fax:  608/265-2814
e-mail:  brifkin at facstaff.wisc.edu

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